This invention relates generally to surfactant compositions and more specifically to surfactant compositions that are derived from oligoglycerol.
Surfactants are important materials that find use across a broad spectrum of applications. A wide variety of surfactant types are known. One class is the nonionic surfactants, which are used in many commercial and household applications where advantage is taken of their superior performance as wetting agents, their detergency and scouring characteristics and resistance to hard water conditions, as well as their adaptability for being combined with other types of surfactants.
Many common nonionic surfactants are prepared by the addition of ethylene oxide or mixtures of ethylene oxide and propylene oxide to various alcohols, which are generally long-chain monohydric alcohols. Numerous different adducts have been prepared, some of which contain only oxyethylene groups while others contain a random distribution of oxyethylene and oxypropylene groups or discrete blocks of polyoxyethylene and polyoxypropylene.
In recent years, there has been a trend towards surfactants based on naturally-occurring materials, with the goal that such surfactants would exhibit favorable environmental properties, such as ready biodegradation, and would be available from renewable sources.
Carbohydrate-based materials, such as alkyl glycosides and alkyl polyglycosides (APGs), which are derived from sugar, have been attractive materials for meeting the foregoing goals. However, the widespread use of APGs has been hampered because their surfactancy properties are often not as favorable as those of their alkylene oxide/alcohol derived counterparts. For instance, many APGs are too high-foaming, unstable in acidic environments, exhibit poor miscibility, have poor wetting on hydrophobic surface, and/or have poor cleaning power, also they are unable to provide good dynamic surface tension reduction which is important for many applications, such as paints and coatings, adhesives, inks, and hard surface cleaning in which new surface/interface formation occurs rapidly.
The problem addressed by this invention is the provision of nonionic surfactants that may be prepared from naturally occurring materials, and that also exhibit favorable surfactancy properties, in particular excellent dynamic surface tension reduction property